The Pay Per Click (PPC) model and Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are often mistaken as being opposite ends of the spectrum. However, the two models of Internet marketing are valuable in any online management strategy. Most campaigns tend to focus more on Google Adwords, using the PPC model, and the SEO part is given a miss, or vice versa. However, a careful blend of Google Adwords and Organic SEO can yield long term, cost effective and sustainable results for your marketing campaign.

All About Adwords
There is little doubt that Google Adwords helps you reach out to your target audience in a timely manner. Moreover, the results can be quantified and measured. Most Internet marketing campaigns tend to bank upon this aspect of the PPC model, since the focus is on immediate results. With Adwords offering the choice of restricting IPs, selecting and limiting the target audience based on region, age group, preferred language and several other parameters, this model is highly attractive and is on the priority list for most campaigns. It is similar to paid advertising on select websites that command traffic from your target audience.

However, research shows that users tend to trust search engine results more than Adwords or PPC results. One research quantifies the number of users trusting Adwords to only 30% compared to 70% going with the website results pages. The reason for this is that Adwords placed on the right side of the page have less visibility. In addition, users do not trust Adwords, since they are paid advertisements.

The Cost Effective Model of Organic SEO
Organic SEO has its own advantages and disadvantages in online management. It can play an impressive role in driving long term results, while at the same time being less useful if your campaign is immediate. For instance, you cannot spread the word about an exhibition due in a month through organic SEO. The use of social networking websites can, of course, yield magnificent results in such cases.

But if you are looking for long term visibility, then a targeted SEO strategy is a great idea. Specialist SEO professionals can find the right keywords for your campaign and the right content will definitely help your website achieve desired page rankings. The only issue is that it requires concentrated effort and some patience. But once the page rankings are achieved and your website features in the top search results, you are sure to benefit in terms of traffic. However, the changing algorithms of search engines mean that you have to maintain and update the website to avoid any loss in page rankings.

Achieving the Right Mix
An online management strategy in which Google Adwords and Organic SEO are not mutually exclusive will hav eboth short and long term effectiveness. Carving a strategy beautifully combing both models will benefit your internet marketing campaign and increase visibility. You can derive the ratio in which you want to use each model by evaluating your campaign on parameters like duration, cost or budget, target audience, and required penetration or visibility.

Our 7 Steps for a Social Media Marketing Success

Small business marketing is often a difficult task for the business owner/operator so here are seven steps as suggested by social media experts at Brisbane Branding that can help every marketer create an effective and successful social media strategy:

1. Establish your business goals and objectives

First of all, it is important to chalk out the goals and objectives of your social media efforts to promote your business. When identifying your goals, keep in mind that they need to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. Social media goals for a business may be generating awareness, generating new leads and prospects, boosting sales or increasing brand visibility. Depending on your sales process and business focus, your goals might be more specific. You can also seek assistance from an online management company in Brisbane for this purpose.

2. Understand your target audience

It is vital to understand your target audience before starting branding in Brisbane through social media. However, for success, you need to do more than that – you need to make sure that you understand the major and minor activities of the target market and how it uses social media. Your social media marketing strategy should include the platforms your target audience would use. Determine how they make use of social media when they are shopping – do they use it for input only or do they look for additional information.

3. Choose social media networks

Marketing through social media needs considerable effort and time on the marketing professional’s part. This is why you need to make a wise decision regarding the social media networks you will be focusing more on. Spend some time exploring various social media networks and how they can be used to your benefit before making any decision. If however, you are having a hard time deciding on which platform would work the best for you, you could consider approaching an online management company in Brisbane to help you choose the right social media networks.

4. Expand your brand

Make sure that you update the standard of your brand from time to time to ensure that you are making the most of your branding opportunities while branding in Brisbane. In today’s world packed with content marketing and social media, you brand may require something more than just a tagline and a logo. Expand your brand using images, live formats, audio and video.

5. Develop a content strategy

While working on different platforms it is important to understand your target audience and their needs on different platforms. Rehashing the same content or information and using it on different platforms isn’t enough. Find out what type of information your target market seeks and what other marketers are offering them. You need to determine how this content is different from yours and formulate your content marketing strategy based on that.

6. Enhance your presence in social media

Develop an advertising plan to convince your audience to visit your page on social media. Your target market uses social media to connect with friends and family, not marketers, so you need to offer them some sort of incentive in order to grab their attention and get them to your social media page. Consider offering freebies, coupons or discounts to persuade them.

7. Measure your results 

In order to measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy, you need to have certain metrics related to your business goals in place. It is very important to measure and determine whether your strategy is delivering the desired results. These metrics need to be determined beforehand and you must ensure that the means necessary to monitor them are incorporated in your strategy.

Finally, the success of any small business marketing campaign will only be realised if your efforts are aligned purposefully with the goals and objectives of your business.

What Does Google Analytics Do?
In a nutshell, Google Analytics helps with online management as it collects traffic statistics gleaned from your website and presents those figures in graphical form. For instance, if you wanted to know how many page views or unique visitors per day your website receives, you’d simply go to your Google Analytics Dashboard and click on the tab for the site in question. Once you’ve signed up, you can add up to 50 separate websites for free and track up to 5 million page views per month which can really power up your internet marketing efforts. If you manage to exceed that traffic, you’ll need to sign up for an AdWords account to continue using the service for free.

Set Up and Installation
To get started, head over to Google’s Analytics home page and click “Sign Up Now” under the Access Now tab. Once you’ve gotten your account configured, you can begin to track traffic. When setting up a tracking campaign, Google will ask you what domain you want to record analytics for and then generate a snippet of Javascript which you’ll embed in your website’s source code. Just add the Google Analytics Javascript code to your HTML page directly above the tag before the main body. Once uploaded to your server, that piece of Javascript will record traffic statistics for your site and forward them to Google Analytics.

How To Use GA Data
The basic work flow of analytics testing is to track your traffic, measure and analyze that traffic based on your preferred criteria, and modify your websites as needed to improve ROI, internet marketing and click-through numbers. The information gathered from Google Analytics’ daily reports will show you what’s working and what’s not. GA now features real-time reporting, so you’ll be able to look at up to the minute results when it comes to bounce rates, clicks and time on site. Here are a few tips to help you make immediate use of your analytics feedback to improve your pages.

Final Word
As you can see, installing and configuring Google Analytics for basic purposes is a breeze and really can help with your online management and internet marketing. Just about any user of any skill level can begin recording critical data from their websites in minutes. For more detailed information on how to use Google Analytics, check out the Google Analytics IQ Lessons page. If you feel your time would be better spent focusing on your core strengths rather than fiddling with analytics and tracking, it may make sense to outsource the online management of your Internet marketing campaigns to the experts. In any event, just know that Google Analytics is a full-featured and versatile tool that can be used to greatly improve your websites and get the most out of your Internet marketing efforts.

In place of traditional advertising, small businesses are steadily turning towards search engine marketing, a method that uses search engine mechanics to increase long-term site viewership. Search engine marketing, when compared to traditional marketing, is cheap, accessible, and easily tailored to any business marketing strategy, however, without first understanding its principles, it can be easily confusing. Here is why your business should consider search engine marketing to improve your small business marketing.

Increased Website Traffic

Search engines are used by people to find content. So, to connect users, search engines try to connect the most relevant sites to the user, based on their search terms. When websites hold a top spot on the search engine, they are often referred to first in a list of thousands. Search engine marketers and online management companies tap this resource to increase the likelihood of being seen, which in turn increases the site’s ad and customer return rates. A Search Engine Marketing company may also be referred to as an SEO company or an online management company.

Search Engine Marketing is Cheap and Accessible

Businesses have many options when it comes to search engine marketing, the best being in consulting services. This is because most SEM strategies fail without guidance and vision. Otherwise, marketers can create text for free on the Internet, or pay a determined amount for content, site adjustments and URL domains. In short, your business is capable of adapting budgets before you begin. When you learn more about search engine marketing, you will eventually find that this works well with nearly any current marketing method. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a tactic that uses key terms, back-links and URL adjustments to increase a website’s search engine index standing. The evolving nature of Search Engine Optimisation means that many businesses utilise a specialist SEO Company to ensure they rank highly for people searching for their brand, services or products.

Help is Available for Every Need

Search engine marketing is a relatively new concept, however, a booming industry has developed behind it. Businesses may do their own work, through private writing contractors, or with an SEO company. Content creation websites have also sprung up to handle any company workload, such as article press releases.  Online management companies can also analyse your industry and people’s search engine habits. These companies can plan years worth of search engine marketing strategies.

The Internet has over 1.8 billion users worldwide, of which half use a search engine daily to find content. Nearly half of these people will be looking for information about products, in countries like yours. So, if you want to expand your business, tap into search engine marketing. It increases your website traffic, is cheap and readily accessible, and there is backbone industry of online management companies ready to help you make the most of it. Consider making SEM part of your small business marketing strategy.

Every online marketing effort requires great content, even small business marketing. Great content generates an audience, an audience increases your visibility to search engines and that translates to traffic to your site. According to the 2012 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, content marketing continues to be the top priority for marketing professionals, this year. The report said that the nine out of ten organizations today use content for marketing their products or services. On an average, marketing professionals allocate over 25% of their annual marketing budget for content. Furthermore, posting articles or blogs and social media are amongst the most used tactics and are critical to successful online management. One important thing to keep in mind when generating new content for your blog is you need to gear your efforts towards improving organic visibility. Here in this article some of our experts at Brisbane Branding will take a look at some effective ways of generating content, as part of your online management strategy, to help you boost your website’s or blog’s conversion rate.

Tips on Generating Content for Blogs

Generating good quality and useful content is what ensures the success of your blog and long term effectivess of your small business marketing efforts.  However, generating fresh and original content repeatedly can be quite a task. Here are some effective tips for generateing content as part of your online management strategy -

1. Include Forums - Consider hosting a search engine friendly forum on your blog or website. Besides adding value to your blog through fresh user generated content, forums also tend to do quite well on search engine results pages for questions users ask. These forums can have discussions on any topic, right from health and food to games and travel – as long as they are relevant to your audience and your business.

2. Use Articles for Answering Questions – Articles are a great way to answer questions and add value to your blog. Look for questions users are asking when researching for keywords and answer them through relevant articles. Answering questions that are useful for your audience also help to portray you as an expert in your domain. Consider posting articles that provide relevant and valuable information to your audience such as How Tos, Guides and Tips.

3. Allow Customers’ Reviews - Allowing customers to review products or services and posting them on your blog is a great way of generating unique user generated content and if the reviews are good, you can even boost your conversion rates.

4. Publish Top Lists – People tend to like lists a lot. So whenever you think it makes sense, add a top 10 list to your blog. Now these lists may be about anything, right from Top 10 Tips to Top 10 Mistakes, as long as the topic of the list is relevant to your business and useful for your target audience.

5. Add Product Info, Video, Images - Adding content such as user generated reviews, small snippets of articles with links for the full article, images and videos will help increase conversions as well as boost search results by making your website’s product pages more unique as compared to other websites offering the same product. Besides that, putting up additional content on the blog may also help your pages end up in a larger number of search results.

Putting up unique, original, relevant and interesting content is the key to success when it comes to small business marketing. Don’t just copy any topic and begin writing about it. Make sure you spend some time researching and looking for relevant topics that are useful for your audience and add value to your blog.

Google Analytics provides insights about web traffic and the efficacy of the internet marketing campaign. This is an easy way of improving your local, small business marketing plan. Let’s take a look at the advantages offered by Google Analytics:

Cash on Higher Converting Pages/Links

With Google Analytics, you can find out the links and pages that are most clicked on by your website visitors. You can also find out on which page, your visitors are spending most of their time. According to these findings, you can improve your local, small business, marketing strategies to increase traffic.

Understand the Effectiveness of SEO

The search engines which send maximum traffic to your website will be clearly illustrated by the Search Engine Traffic Metric feature of Google Analytics. You can also figure out how search engines generate this traffic and convert them. In addition, it helps you to find out the keywords that lead traffic to your website. If there are certain keywords that are generate more leads for your site, you can increase your internet marketing spends.

Apart from the aforementioned features, you will be pleased to know that Google Analytics is integrated with Google AdWords. Google AdWords displays your business ads on Google search result pages and their promotion networks on a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis; this means that you pay an advertising fee to Google only if people click on your ads. This is a good way of strengthening your local/small business marketing strategies.

Take An Example

Thomas, an IT professional from Denmark, has been running a tech-specific blog as a part of his hobby. Within a few months he felt the need to know how well his blog was being received by people worldwide. So, he added Google Analytics to his website and discovered that the number of people visiting his blog was increasing steadily. The traffic directed to his blog by Google increased remarkably from 63.45% in Q1 to 94.62 % in Q3 2011. Thomas also discovered that sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.com, were referring his blog. In addition, the fact that Google promoted his blog to a page rank 3 in Q3 boosted the blog’s traffic flow. The tactic employed by Thomas can be effectively used even by SMEs. If you wish to improve your local or small business marketing strategy, Google Analytics is the way to go.

SEO is critical for online business growth since it can increase or decrease your Google PageRank. Your PageRank is determined by a Google-developed link-based algorithm that assigns your site a number from 1-10. The higher your rating, the more visible your site will be to Internet searchers. This ranking depends upon how efficiently you use the main tool of SEO: your keywords. Picture someone sitting down at a computer and typing in the word or words they are searching for into the search engine box. After clicking ‘enter’, the search engine returns a listing of websites that best use those words. The location of websites in this listing is determined by the site’s PageRank.

Web crawlers associated with search engines, known as bots, continually scroll through web pages searching for keywords. From this list, you can use key word optimisation tools to check how your site performs when an Internet searcher enters certain phrases to find your site. From this list, keyword optimisation tools can decide how popular certain words or phrases are to Internet searchers. Focusing on the will aid you in get the traffic to drive your business growth online.

SEO is also influenced by the popularity of the content that you create on the web using Web 2.0 tools. Engaging in social media grows your business online by increasing popularity. Web 2.0 tools allows your website visitors the chance to share your videos, Web 2.0 marketing articles and press releases instantaneously with friends and business associates. Posting a video about your business or product to social media sites such as YouTube can increase your website’s visibility, but only if done in a professional way. Posting your press releases to any number of online portals will also help with your online growth. You must properly place your keywords throughout your Web 2.0 tools marketing tools to efficiently grow your business.

When used correctly, SEO can better target your website toward the customers you want and drive your online business growth. Keywords, again, are the tool. Keywords give you the chance to gear your business toward Internet searchers who are looking for just what you offer. Using the proper amount of keywords throughout your website and Web 2.0 tools marketing tools will help your website stand out from your competitors. Have you ever sat down at a computer and searched for something, only to have a list of websites returned that have nothing to do with what you were searching for? Those websites were not using their keywords efficiently to target potential customers. Take some time to think about terms that apply to your target market. Be careful though since improper usage of keywords can blacklist your website from being listed on search engines.

SEO is critical for online business growth, since it can make or break your Internet presence.